Writing Assessment Project

• Why Participate in WAP
• Frequently Asked Questions (FAQS)
• Intent to Participate On-line Form
• Writing Assessment Rubric

Writing and communication skills are an important part of students’ undergraduate core competencies. We have a unique opportunity to facilitate a university-wide project to provide evidence of student writing abilities.

Because we appreciate your expertise in this area, we invite you to help with this project by collecting one complete set of clean, ungraded papers from your upper-division, capstone, or upper-division W course. Papers will be submitted to the Office of Institutional Assessment by the end of December 2009.   

To contribute to this important project, please click “Intent to Participate .”

We are looking for student work from:

• upper-division, capstone, or upper-division “W” courses
• individual writing assignments of approximately 5-20 pages of text in length
• assignments that can be read by a more general academic audience.

We request that your set of papers be submitted with the following:

• your college name
• department name
• course name, number and type
• assignment type and brief assignment description
• the prompt or assignment.

You may submit them to Dr. Yan Zhang in hard copy or electronically, whichever is more convenient, at the end of the fall 2009 term.

ATTN: Dr. Yan Zhang
Office of Institutional Assessment
1157 TAMU
Pavilion, Suite 105
assessment@tamu.edu

Student work will be reviewed by university faculty.  Results will be reviewed by university groups working with institutional assessment. Neither the student names nor the faculty names will be included in the analysis or any results.  We hope that the information gleaned in this study will show areas where student writing is strong, as well as generate ideas for improvement.   

You will receive feedback in the form of an aggregated final report.  Data from your class will be included only in the aggregate.